Work Text:
[Captain Erik Magnus "Mags" Lehnsherr is waiting for me in the recently re-opened old cafeteria of New York University. Although he left military service ten years ago, his background is obvious to anyone looking. He surveys the room at regular intervals, always expecting an attack. There is a leather notebook in which he'd been sketching when I walked in. He doesn’t bother with small talk; a perfunctory “good morning” is all I get before he begins his tale.]
You are familiar with Emma Frost.
As well as any survivor can be. She was a low-level government official, I believe, during the Great Panic?
Good, because the particulars are classified.
There were rumors…
...which I will not discuss. Suffice to say Frost was given an entourage, access to whatever transport was deemed necessary, and a task. There were six of us assigned to be her guard. It was all that could be spared at the moment: a chopper, six mix-and-match grunts, a stuck-up bitch to protect and orders to travel the continent.
The urban areas of the United States were overrun by then.
What wasn't. We set out in late March. It was a good season, winter was ending, every slightly populated area was sprouting thawed Zack like daisies, and Frost would wear nothing but white skirts and stiletto heels. She still walked faster than Zack could hobble, but little details like that can grate when you have half a ton of equipment on your back, much of it hers. I can't say everything went swimmingly all the time, but we were moving on a schedule and the data had been satisfactory.
Your mission was related to…
Ancient military tradition of None of Your Fucking Business. [He pauses] I wish I cared about the government enough to say I am protecting their precious secrets, but the truth is I just don't know. South African Plan is the obvious answer, but I would be hard-pressed to find a correlation between what we did and what ended up happening. All I know is that Frost was collecting data, data went to HQ, HQ transmitted them elsewhere, we didn't ask and she didn’t volunteer anything Our job was to make sure Frost got there and back again with a pulse. The rest was irrelevant. Maybe that's why we were such a messy bundle. I'm a German on loan from the UN forces, so I don’t have clearance for anything; Logan was magically transported via a time machine from his native plains of Neanderthaland in what we currently call Canada, strike one, two and the third I’m guessing for the sideburns; Raven, Azazel and Riptide are marines, so they don’t ask questions period. Angel, I think, started off in the navy then transferred to the UN forces, so we got there together.
The seven of you toured the infected east coast and made it out alive. That's an impressive achievement.
Thanks for spoiling my big finish. Really. Thank you. For a writer your sense of a suspenseful narrative is shit.
I didn't know it was a secret.
If it was a secret I would have confiscated your recorder, yet there it is.
Still, you led the squad through what could euphemistically be described as hell, and not one of them died.
That's what I get for trying to do your job. Never mind. I had initially thought the mission was redundant, not because of what Frost was after, but six of us on any machine we could conceivably fly (and between Angel and Azazel it was most things we could come across) seemed like overkill. At first we spent all of the time in the air, so we barely even got to get our hands dirty, and we were carrying all these guns at all times. It was frustrating. We could see hell unfolding all around, and there was no undead head to point at. At that time Zack wasn’t in complete control yet, there were still people. Some of them were heading north, some of them were fortifying their homes, making a stand. Families. We saw a suburban housewife taking out three zombies in a row with a kitchen knife, protecting her kids, but one of them had already been infected.
You first came to the US when the Panic was already in full swing, after your—
There is one person I will have ever discussed that with, and the person is not you.
Understood.
Six weeks of hopping from base to base, refueling, watching Frost jot things down took their toll. We were restless. Time of the war being what it was, mass evacuations, mass slaughter as far as they eye could see, we had it laughably easy, so of course we were all waiting for something to go wrong, something to blow up in our faces. Then, of course, it did. I'm not saying it was a completely random happenstance – you put six highly trained, high-strung professional sharpshooters in closed quarters and the least you can expect is a violent, unfunny sitcom – but it wasn't a rookie thing, either. I'm just glad it wasn't one of mine who fucked up, but I have no illusions that my yelling didn't contribute.
We were in Massachusetts, and from what we've been able to piece together later, what happened was this: some idiot forgot to lock the door.
That's it?
That's it. We went in late in the afternoon, and the commander was so wet behind the ears you could have wrung him out for water supply. The staff was wandering about aimlessly, like confused ducklings, bumping off each other. If it weren't for the fact there was no bloodspatter on the walls, I might have assumed this was zombie territory already. In the circumstances what was I supposed to do, but conduct a little micromanaging? If you ask Raven she'd tell you I made the commander-in-base shit his pants, which I won't deny. Better he feared me than Zack, given the situation. Unfortunately, this moron was unsuited to manage anything bigger than a henhouse, and even a henhouse would have voted him out for being a bird-brain. He hadn't yet learned how to manage his own anger. He took it out on his subordinates, who took it out on their subordinates, and in about an hour every soldier in the base was breaking out hives at the sight of an officer. Someone screwing up something as simple as locking a door was at the same time unforgivable and completely understandable.
Before we knew it, the base was crawling with Zack. There were always hordes outside, all communication had to happen by air, via the landing on the roof, so before someone realized the howling was coming from inside, they were being eaten. It was a small base, hardly any space within the perimeter, no landing strip, just the base and a chain link fence. Shitty place to keep a lookout on, especially in a storm, and that storm was taking home all awards.
We owe surviving that fucking mess to Raven. Funny thing, that. Up until that point everyone thought of her as the token girl in the squad, even though she was bigger and stronger than Angel. There was something soft about her and of course it was her first long-term mission, fresh out of training. That's probably why. Anyway. We were in the middle of a meal, and all of sudden I see her go quiet. Base was built solid, but the howling… You know. There was no concrete in the world to shield you from that. So we're chewing the delightful gruel, when all of sudden this kid, this doll-faced painted redhead – I'm not shitting you, she was a marine, and she dyed her hair tomato red – leans forward and says, coolly enough to rival Frost's normal voice, "Mags, I hear howling inside."
What did you do?
I couldn't hear for shit. Sooner or later you tune them out. I chewed through the spoonful, set the spoon down, took Frost by the arm and marched her out of the mess hall. My squad followed. No alarms, no nothing. We were well on the way to the helipad, when we saw the first ghouls. The corridor was narrow and they were coming from one direction, so all we did was we dealt with them, and then we jogged up the stairs. I pulled the alarm when we were on the top floor and locked the door from outside.
There were no survivors.
[quietly] No. [He hesitates] I'm still not sure whether I should be proud of what I did then. Our chopper was the only usable transport the base had on hand. It wasn't equipped to carry more than ten people, and we had packs of supplies strapped to the seats, electronics, mostly. We couldn’t have taken more than one, maybe two extra. There were fifty soldiers at that base. It was a military outpost. They were armed, and we had a mission with national security ranking of pretty goddamned high. The fact that we pulled the alarm as late as we did saved us from Zack and having to fight our way to the chopper. We would have gotten there, I believe that. They really are the best, my squad, and the base was staffed with terrified kids. We've had every advantage. This wasn't long after Yonkers, so chances were they would go shooting indiscriminately the moment shit hit the fan, all we'd have needed to do would be take cover and pick them off in the door. Lucky for me, I am antisocial, so I didn’t bother to speak to or even look at the local personnel, so I get to sleep at night, not sure about the others. We try to pretend it never happened.
Of course, getting to the chopper didn't mean we were out of the woods. The storm was in full swing, so all of us were shitting our pants, except Frost, who would probably survive a dinner with Satan with her underwear soiled only by her ladyboner. Angel took us over the base, fighting the weather, so we had balcony seats to the spectacle. Human voices carry, you know? Especially the wailing.
So we were sitting cozy and warm in the chopper, further and further away from the base which was starting to look like an anthill. No one was saying anything. Then Angel turned to me and said, "Mags, we ain't got fuel."
It wasn't a good day to be alive, let me tell you. We were supposed to stay in the base for three days, until our rations were replenished, and instead we were flying on fumes over a sea of Zack, knowing there's no way we make it to any outpost of civilization. I told them – sometimes it's no use hiding the truth. I'm pretty sure Frost was the only one who didn't start panicking. I know that, because the moment I finished talking she pulled out her laptop and a satellite phone and began typing and hitting send every minute. It takes a special kind of mind to sit in an airborne machine that's going to fall any minute, typing dismissive comments on the quality of the base we had just abandoned.
I might have been peeking over her shoulder. Sue me.
The chopper went down.
The plan was to get as far as possible towards the nearest safehouse, set it down gently and walk. The storm took care of the setting down part. The direction we picked would take us as close as we could get to areas where we could find shelter. The landing… Angel is good, but elements are hard to fight. We went in hot, and the controlled crash didn't do us any favors, although it could have been worse. Riptide found a sharp piece of metal with his thigh, which was the worst of it, by some miracle. Other than that we had a concussion, a sprained wrist and plenty of bruises. Of course we had to land near a pack of hungry Zs, but as there were only ten of them, it was more of an inconvenience than an alarm. They started moaning as soon as they saw us, and how do you know how many are listening in from the distance? Crash like that, all you can do is salvage what you can and walk, and with enemies approaching you take whatever's on top. We were low on supplies, anyway, though not on bottles, so we managed to store some water in the rain. We had rations and a GPS; with plenty of luck and not eating much we could make it to a mall with outdoor parking and with some extra helpings of luck, we could call for rescue. I mean, if Frost was as important as she thought she was.
The first ten miles Riptide kept up, with some assistance. It was later that we began to count our bullets, know what I'm saying? Suddenly shooting every Z was a calculation, not just a necessity. Suddenly every bullet was part of a countdown. We had plenty, but…
Logan pretty much stopped talking. We figured out he reverted to his natural language of grunts, but then the same happened to the rest of us. Talking took valuable energy.
The stupid thing is, we had no cell phones. We didn't have phones, because clearly we were important enough to warrant a chopper, but heaven forbid we tweeted what Frost was really up to, so there went contacting the outside world. Frost'd had the satellite phone, which didn't survive the crash. Her laptop did – or at least the hard drive, we later found out – the phone went. So we had porn, but no communication.
Second day in we stumbled over a police cruiser. I wish I could say it was empty. The radio crackled and hissed, but at least we got an SOS out, for all the good it did. Funny story there. We didn't linger – the car was dead, someone took the battery and ran – but we took the crappy budget radio. [Lehnsherr smiles to himself] We holed up for the night in the attic of a barn. I was scanning the frequencies and around eleven I hit something. It was a guy, he sounded young. "Hello," he kept saying, and when I replied the little fucker went on with the rest of the song. Raven damn near pissed herself laughing. Even Logan snorted.
"I'm in Mystic, 23 Church Road, top floor. Do you need help?" the kid said. "There's only so much I can do, but I can help you!"
"Are you alone?"
"Yeah. My mom… Yeah. Shit."
"You got supplies?"
"Plenty! I've got meds and food, and there's a tank on the roof."
"Then do yourself a favor, sit tight, block the doors and keep your mouth shut about where you are," I told him. "You're lucky no one's raided you yet." It wasn't close enough, anyway. We'd never have made it that far.
Do you know what happened to him?
No. I tried looking, but when I was in New York again Lionel Richie didn't answer.
We were around Pine Plains, heading south. Worst came to worst, I thought, because I knew exactly nothing about that area, there had to be apartment blocks. I was more or less wrong. We avoided major groupings of Zack and were making good progress, but Riptide could only survive so much. Already he was feverish. It took us a couple of days to pick through about forty miles. We began to see more and more Zs and well, it was the time when we began thinking that a last huzzah, followed by a bullet to the brain, might be in order. The evening we realized that was, as you can imagine, one of the least fun evenings in living memory. We'd finished the last of our rations that afternoon, we still had water and chewing gum, which meant a supply run into a town was in order, and our ammo supply was so low, everyone had one bullet in their pockets, so that they didn't fire it by accident. No fire, naturally, but luckily for us Riptide was as good as a radiator, at that point. We knew we couldn't get much farther. The radio had a range of a hundred miles, going by the manufacturer's promise, but was about as reliable as means of communication as a torch.
We'd been days on the road, hungry, without a reprieve in sight, because nothing we saw was even remotely defensible. There comes a point when you just accept that you will die, and in a way that is liberating. We walked. All we had left. Walk and radio for help.
Until the radio answered.
Unlike Lionel Richie in Mystic, most people found out the hard way that radioing your position was idiocy – I think it was the celebrity death match that finally drove that home. I wonder how Lionel missed the memo.
Still, the radio answered. It was so beat up I couldn't even tell if I was talking to a man or a woman, or a recorded message. "How many?" was the first question. "Seven. One seriously injured." No kidding. Riptide needed every antibiotic known to man, by the color his leg turned. I'm still amazed we didn't take that leg home in a backpack.
"What's your position?" Thankfully the GPS was still working, so I was able to give him – I guessed it was a him, in between crackling the voice sounded deep enough – the exact figures. "Head south, towards Yorktown Heights. There is a motel along the road, you can't miss it. Good defensible position to stay put and survive the night. I'll check in on you in the morning."
Not very encouraging.
On the contrary. Unlike Lionel, this one knew what he was doing; he knew the terrain well enough to provide useful information. Plus, we had exactly nothing to lose by listening. It was nearly twenty miles, but we made it to the motel. There was a vending machine behind the reception, so we feasted on three packets of M&Ms and a can of soda that had been stuck in the drawer. It's unbelievable how easy it is to raise morale with a handful of peanuts and a human voice on the radio.
Sleep is not exactly easy in the middle of hostile territory, so by dawn we were all awake and trying not to stare too obviously at the radio. He didn't give us an exact check-in time, right? In the morning is a general term. So, we were staring at the piece of plastic for about two hours when it finally started crackling, and I am not exaggerating when I say we cheered. There were even a couple of "fuck yeahs".
"Good morning," was the call. "Calling in on YH motel. How are you doing?" Like a fucking concierge.
"Still alive," I told him.
"What's your situation?"
"Squad of seven, one man down. He needs urgent medical assistance."
"You are military," he said. I confirmed. There was a moment of silence, and well. I wouldn't have blamed him for cutting contact. People hadn't exactly been keen on letting us, as in the military, in since Yonkers proved what achievers we were. They were. None of mine had served at Yonkers, and I'm betting anything they were thanking their gods they hadn't.
"Rendezvous at six klicks west from your current position, we'll bring you in," he said eventually. "We have news of a horde moving in from the north, optimistic estimate is two hours. You have to make it before they get here. We can't help you otherwise."
"Roger that," I told him, and to the rest, what was there to say but "We haul ass." This was easier said than done. Riptide had to be carried and none of us was ready to run. Fuck running, we could barely muster up a jog. Frost was limping, as it wasn't until the previous night we found shoes for her that weren't the absurd heels.
We made it to the rendezvous in just over an hour. There was just enough time to get seriously worried, when we saw him, a kid on a fucking horse. He couldn't have been more than nineteen, a little smartass punk by the looks he'd been throwing us, and armed to the teeth. "I've got them," he said into a radio, and got off. "We had a situation, couldn't afford airing the carriage. Shit, he looks bad." The stupid-ass kid was giving Riptide a dark look, the kind you don't need to see twice to know what they mean. "Look, we're all good fucking Samaritans, but if he's infected, I am putting a bullet in him right now."
"He's not infected." Logan broke his vow of silence to deliver the nugget of wisdom around his cigar. "We have enough bullets left to cure that."
"Yeah, well, we have dogs, so lying won't get you far, anyway." The kid was so nervous he was vibrating, and covering it up with tough-guy attitude, I can't imagine why. It wasn't like he was staring down a bloodied, feverish, half-conscious guy twice his size. "Load him up. I'll take him right away, but the rest of you will have to hoof it."
I have to tell you – this was a surprise. Enough to make all of us pause and look at the kid, even though no one was stupid enough to think we were secure. "What?" he asked.
"Just trying to figure out how you made it this far in life," Logan told him.
"Groveling to the lovechild of the patron saint of poor life choices and Mother Teresa. Look, it's your funeral. The best I can do is take the dead weight off your hands, get him help sooner. You wanna haul his ass yourselves, I can point you in the right direction and be on my merry."
Fair point, right? The choices we had weren't many. We loaded Janos up on the horse, the kid swung up right after him and gave us coordinates. "Rural road," he said, "you can't miss it. There's an iron gate there with a huge-ass paddle. Good luck."
He was gone and we were on our own, but without baggage – it does a lot to ease a mind, knowing one of yours is either safe or dead, and that the choice is out of your hands. We ran, or got as close to running as we could, with the amount of food and rest we had. We were four miles out, it turned out, which was good. The coordinates got us to an isolated mansion, surrounded by a pretty run of the mill perimeter, guarded by an expensive-looking but ineffectual fence. Not much to it. We took out the few Zack milling about, easy as you please, and then the radio started crackling.
"YH motel," he said. "We have visual on a hundred plus Zs between you and the gate. Go south. Run, if you can. There is a ladder a klick away. You can make it."
As it happened, he was halfway through dispensing the advice when we made contact. I assume you've seen swarms? To this day I don't think I have ever seen anything more terrifying than a swarm, and I've been to a few unsavory places. This wasn't even that big a crowd, nothing worse than an evening at a mall, and yet… A hundred decaying faces, suddenly turning your way, snapping their jaws. It's the kind of sight that makes your mind go blank, makes you dig through your pockets for that one bullet you've been saving.
There we were, six of us and what, twenty Zack per head? More were staggering along, and behind them miles of brick wall, standing at about nine feet, with barbed wire along the top and the gate bolted shut. So far so good, I remember thinking, as we turned and started running south. As far as dreams go, running on peanut-chocolate fumes with a hundred Zs in hot pursuit is not a good one. I had Frost by one arm at that point, Azazel had the other and we all knew that she was on the verge of dropping from sheer exhaustion, and the swarm seemed to be spreading along the walls. We saw it, finally – the ladder. The ladder. Really. Someone had a sense of humor. Seven missing bricks, seven protruding bricks. You wouldn't even notice, but there was the kid, the little punk on a horse, standing on top of the wall with a shotgun in his hand. He wasn't a great shot, I can tell you that, but with your target ten feet away, you don't need to be. Zack was drawing closer to the noise, and gaining.
You think you have time, with Zack. They aren't fast, but they are steady. We had minutes. At best. You try climbing a vertical ladder one at a time with a hundred Zs on your ass, you tell me how easy it is. To this day I can't remember how we managed. I know that I was the last one to go. I know that I felt Zack grasping at my ankle. It was a small one, a kid, in a ragged Spiderman t-shirt, which is how I'm still alive. I remember that, because when I went over the wall, slammed into the ground, I had dragged the thing with me, with its teeth clamped around my heel and a neat bullet hole in its forehead.
I remember staring at its mangled little face, at the t-shirt, the bones keeping its elbow and wrist together, and I remember looking up at my own fucking personal guardian angel. There was a man sitting awkwardly on the wall. He was about my age, but he looked younger. He held a rifle in his hands and he was staring down at me with the biggest grin on his face. "Welcome," he said, "to Xavier Institute."
[Lehnsherr falls silent for a moment] My first coherent thought, one that was actual words, so it took a while, was holy shit, a fucking cripple just saved my ass. In my defense, you don't get much in the way of sensitivity training in the military, just constant drilling – be faster, move, pick it up you little shit and run, I don't care how much it weighs. And here was this guy, wearing an Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a waistcoat – a waistcoat! – getting down the tall steps with his legs hanging limp. He slid into a wheelchair at the bottom and wheeled himself towards me, handed the rifle off to the little punk and held out his hand. "Your friend isn't well. Hank will do what he can, but his job description had always been telling flus and colds apart, or contusions and breaks," he told me. I don't even know, he could have been telling me Riptide was growing wings under his suit, I couldn't think straight. I was holding his hand and staring, that was all I had the presence of mind for.
And that was where it got really weird. You'd think by then no one would bat an eye at fucking aliens, right, 'cause we had the fucking zombie apocalypse on our hands, which kind of makes you think you know weird intimately. Even discounting that kind of weird, we were within thirty miles of Yonkers and, by the looks of it, perfectly safe. From inside the horde of a couple hundred was manageable; several gunmen could – and in a minute would – do away with it inside an hour. The really weird thing was that when I kicked the wasted zombie away and got somewhat up, when I looked around for my squad and I found them breathing into the ground, unable to do as much as twitch, with the backpacks still on, and I thought "we made it. Day is done, nothing could faze me right now." Then Raven rolled onto her side and looked up. I heard her wheeze, and when I looked again she was staring up at the guy, at my guardian angel, with her eyes big as saucers. "Charles?" she said, and I swear he damn near had a heart attack as he looked down at her. "Oh my fucking god, Charles!"
I know Commander Darkholme had been fostered by the Xaviers as a child.
We knew that the reason Raven joined the marines was that she had a massive falling-out with her brother. Part of the share-and-care drinking package we got two nights before embarking on the grand tour. I knew she felt guilty as hell, when the apocalypse struck, which wasn't all bad, I guess, it gave her something else to feel bad about. I don't know. Weird things keep you sane. For her it was that guilt.
What happened next?
Well, what does happen when you find your brother in a wheelchair in the middle of an apocalypse? There were tears and awkward hugging. If you're asking generally, what happened was that we started picking ourselves up, and we discovered we were surrounded by kids. Not adolescent nightmares, mind, of the early twenties variety, but actual children. The youngest was maybe ten. There were a few adults: a woman dressed like a schoolteacher with an axe in her hand, three or four families, a handful of twentysomethings, yes, but the children outnumbered them two to one. Almost every single person had a weapon on them, even the small ones. And in the forefront was the guy in the wheelchair. Who'd have thunk it, the zombie apocalypse had a disabled entrance.
Xavier Institute was established as a foster home for difficult teens.
Teens in this case meaning minors capable of intentionally getting into trouble.
But you found your safehouse.
We did. Frost, of course, was the first to pick herself up. Her first words, I remember exactly, were "Good afternoon. Thank you for your hospitality. I would like a place to rest and something to eat now." [He shakes his head] You can imagine the looks we exchanged behind her back.
Miss Frost knows what she wants.
The next time we saw her was in the morning. She was up to her elbows in potato gratings. Apparently, latkes were her particular favorite, and she made enough for all the, what, fifty people there? [He sighs] I don't like her. I don't mind saying so. She's not what you'd call a good person, but she is a person who knows her place and for all her other faults, there is nothing fake about her. Put her in a room of politicians, she will grind them under her thumb. Put her in the middle of a zombie outbreak, she will find a transport and enough soldiers to impose order. Put her in a safehouse, she will roll her sleeves and grate potatoes.
There is a reason the reelection was a landslide.
Yeah, god save Emma Frost.
What happened next?
Short version? We caught our breaths and left. The kids were welcoming, there was enough food to go around – would you believe Charles even had some twelve-year-old scotch squirreled away somewhere – but the same day Frost contacted HQ via the long-distance radio, and a week later they sent a chopper. They had enough decency to supply some ammo, rations and seeds, as thank you, although evacuation was clearly off the table. Riptide was well enough to hobble by then, yet another in a string of small miracles. We said our goodbyes and continued the tour with him strapped into the co-pilot's seat. Eventually, about a month later, we made for the safe zone. We were assigned to different units afterwards. Raven went to Honolulu with Azazel, Angel went into relief with Riptide. Logan and I were stationed in California, though which sick mind thought that up I will hopefully never know. [He shows me a thin scar running down his shin] Logan in close quarters for an extended period of time. Cannot end well. I thought I would never be rid of that Neanderthal, then lo and behold, he got called to the Rocky Mountains line.
We never knew what became of the Institute.
You were eventually reunited, all six of you.
At the end of the war, nearly ten years later, when the front line made it to New York state. I hop off the plane to find my place and the five of them are waving at me like morons.
New York State?
Frost made a point of the assignment, I found out later. I bet she thought it would be hilarious to have us revisit.
[He fixes his gaze somewhere behind my back and smiles. I turn to find Dr. Xavier maneuvering himself around students with a tall paper cup between his knees. Lehnsherr shoves a chair aside, to make space for the wheelchair.
Dr. Xavier is currently one of the most popular lecturers in the psychology department, even though he devotes most his time to the Xavier Institute.]
XAVIER: Good afternoon. My apologies, the Q&A sessions are unpredictable.
Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.
XAVIER: Not at all.
You Institute survived the war, virtually unaided.
XAVIER: [laughing] That's not true! We had plenty of aid. Not as an abandoned zone, no – we were far too small and out of the way to qualify. We had aid in the form of advanced warnings of approaching swarms, you can't undervalue those. Zack is not stationary, so if we knew they were coming, we could camp out in the cellar, so that they couldn't detect us. There's no conclusive evidence as to what are their limits of perception (we know for sure that even a thick wall is not enough to remain hidden), but a couple hundred feet compounded with concrete lining does the trick. This seemed like overkill at first, but you must remember the buggers were tenacious and for as long as they perceived a meal on the other side they would throw themselves at the concrete, and for every one that brained itself on the wall there would be three to step on its remains.
We also had the advantage of warning. I had a—Well, never mind. Suffice to say when I spoke with a friend in Israel back in 2012 and she told me what they were doing and why, I believed her wholeheartedly. That same year I had the perimeter walls built, which is yet another advantage we had: money. So you see, when the disaster struck full-force we were sequestered in the mansion, behind nine feet of concrete and brick. A part of me refused to believe it would ever be necessary, because how? I might have believed Gabrielle, but that didn't mean I was taking the threat seriously. I may have installed a few all-purpose cameras, a motion detector, nothing extraordinary. However, shortly after we had that conversation, we've taken in Hisako, and she'd lost her parents a few months earlier to an early attack in the middle of New York City. She watched her mother, who had been bitten by a patient of hers, die and turn on her. What could I do, but promise her safety? The reports of the plague continued to flood the internet, but I can hardly take credit for recognizing the actual danger. Moira MacTaggart, a good friend of mine, was with the CIA, she was the one to bully me into action. I figured that the crime rate was going up, so I did what seemed like the most cost-efficient and reasonable way of assurance.
Even so, how many strongholds fell because of starvation?
XAVIER: It was always a concern. We had plenty of supplies, but if it weren't for the fact that some of my students had grown up in rural areas we would have starved. The winter after Yonkers was harsh, and I nearly doomed us by insisting we stay put. The government went out of its way to insist cold is safe, that heading north is safe, but the dangers were so much more than just the undead.
There were so many people wandering in the snow… [He stares at his hands] It was, I think, the hardest thing I ever had to do: keeping quiet. So many of them had radios and we kept a constant ear out. Since I wasn't useful when it came to most physical work I got radio duty more often than not. So many people died that winter of exposure and starvation, when we had heat and food and even electricity, because I had solar panels on the roof, less because of the environment and more to avoid power outages. You know all about New York, right? The celebrity safehouse, I mean. [He trails off] We watched them go down live. We shut down all communications afterwards. I can't blame the folks who went there. I hope they survived, I do. [Lehnsherr takes his hand and doesn't let go for the rest of the interview. They don't try to conceal the matching golden bands on their fingers.] I just… I couldn't risk letting anyone find out about us.
You picked up Captain Lehnsherr and his team.
XAVIER: It wouldn't hurt us to direct them to a motel I knew was a good defensible spot, without revealing our position. Taking them in was a spur-of-the-moment decision, a risk, yes, but we were growing restless. I was, at least. It was as calculated as can be; we had the advantage, we had weapons, even if they were lying about how many there were, we would see them coming.
They ended up saving our lives. [He grins] Or, you know, sparing us the necessity of resorting to cannibalism. They were long gone, but the provisions we were given got us through November, until we could risk venturing out or foraging for supplies. We learned the hard way that hunting had to become an option and the following spring we had no choice but to assume this wasn't going away, that one scare was enough, and we converted all available space into gardens. We lost so much weight that winter… Like I said, the one thing we truly had in supply was luck.
Fair trade.
XAVIER: More than, I would say. And then they came back, on the forefront of the liberating army.
LEHNSHERR: They were waiting for us with fucking congratulatory lemonade.
XAVIER: [laughing] Well, it turned out Alex, in addition to being great at horseriding, has a green thumb and managed to grow celebratory lemon trees in the greenhouse, which had been a ballroom in its previous life. It seemed fitting to offer the lemons up to victory.
LEHNSHERR: Frost didn't warn us, and we didn't realize, at first, where exactly we were being dropped off. The motel clued us in, and every mile from there was hell. Raven, I think, broke first. She walked with her teeth clenched and luckily enough there was enough Zack to keep us somewhat occupied, else we might have started going crazy. I know I would have shot Frost in the head if she had suddenly appeared before me.
XAVIER: Emma kept in contact with us, but she neglected to mention you. Other than the occasional update, I mean. We knew you were all alive, that Riptide continued to serve – Hank still preens when he remembers that, it was his very first surgery—
LEHNSHERR: Riptide walks with a limp.
XAVIER: Yes, and he's still standing on his own two legs. Don't take this away from Hank, he was a GP before then. We heard Raven had a son, we heard about Angel taking over her unit. We got bits like that, over the years. Then, all of sudden, we heard Sean yelling his head off, that the frontline was approaching: men and women marching towards us, as far as the eye can see. And you six among them. [He smiles at Lehnsherr] It was a good day.
You didn't go any further.
LEHNSHERR: [shrugs] Didn't see the point. This was an isolated outpost where a bunch of kids survived ten years with Zack on the outside and a pacifistic madman on the inside. It was as good a place to stop as any. The line was constantly being resupplied, so one soldier made exactly zero difference. Raven and Logan came back later. Kurt, Raven's son, lives in the mansion now.
XAVIER: We had extraordinary luck, I will be the first to admit it. Most of it was the house we had at our disposal, the resources, but that would have never been enough, if not for the people there. I had such plans when I founded the school, perhaps more ambition than sense, and I can say now that whatever I had hoped for, I wasn’t wrong. My kids, my staff – I am so proud of them. We didn't lose a one. Granted, it might have been peer pressure. We were a small enough community that everyone had to pitch in, every day, and it's not easy to decide to walk away when you know that every day you are actively helping your friends. Ten years in close quarters can and will drive anyone insane, and those were kids who spent their formative years fighting the system, fighting being locked down and chained by authority, and all of a sudden they had to be the authority, themselves, they had to conform. Many wouldn't be able to stand it, but they held out. We held out and we came out whole.
LEHNSHERR: Or at least not missing more marbles than you had going in.
XAVIER: Thank you for that.
Thank you for your time.
[They bid me goodbye and continue to bicker as I leave to catch my plane.]